Race To The Top

Since 2008, the federal takeover of education has accelerated dramatically with the advent of President Obama’s Race to the Top program. That program foisted a set of national academic standards upon the states. Unfortunately, those standards suffer from severe academic deficiencies and their implementation diminishes parenthood, imposes a fiscal burden on the states, and establishes a governance precedent that is irreconcilable with our Founding. It is a federal takeover that will affect public school, private school, and home school children.

Here’s how the program developed:

From 2008 through 2010, the Gates Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided $35 million to a consortium of two non-government trade associations (the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers) for purposes of developing and implementing a new education system in the United States. They called this the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) and published the plan in December 2008.

In February 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Stimulus Bill) into law, which designated a $4.35 billion “executive earmark” for the Department of Education. In other words, the Department of Education received the money with no strings attached.

The federal Department of Education used the Executive Earmark to create and fund the Race to the Top (RTTT) program, a federal grant competition that invited the cash-strapped states to compete for the Stimulus money. But, under the Department’s competition scheme, states had to “commit” to adopting common standards. Commitment meant:

Gubernatorial and bureaucratic pledges lacked any measure of consent or review by the people or their elected representatives in the legislatures.

The states had to make their commitments within two months after publication of the standards, a time frame far too short for proper and thorough review and deliberation.

Most of the state legislatures were not even in session during the “commitment” time period.

The Governors and bureaucrats of the cash-starved states rolled over for the administration with only Governors Palin of Alaska and Perry of Texas initially refusing to commit.

Forty-two states made a commitment, but under the federally-imposed definition of “commitment,” not a single state legislature approved of it.

In April 2011, House Majority Leader, U.S. Rep. John Boehner, included $700 million in a new RTTT earmark for the Department of Education in the budget compromise with President Obama.

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Campbell’s Law

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."